It was every new paediatric junior doctor’s nightmare – attending a crash neonatal resuscitation during a night shift in 2014, and the moment of panic when the mind goes blank. My registrar had asked me to prescribe a drug infusion for an unwell newborn baby, and I found myself frustratingly unable to think straight. Routine tasks can become inexplicably difficult in stressful situations, resulting in mistakes, delays or prescribing errors. Not wishing to repeat this experience, I started to create a free smartphone app to put critical information in the pockets of future junior doctors and nurses working on neonatal intensive care.
Dr Chris Kelly

In 2014, a group of neonatal nurses, doctors and pharmacists came together to improve neonatal care by creating an app to open in every emergency scenario for a rapid reminder of key drug doses, life support algorithms, and memory-jogging checklists to help cut through the brain fog of a busy shift.

Under the guidance of Dr Chris Kelly (lead developer) and Dr Syed Mohinuddin (medical lead) a group of volunteers met up in their spare time to create guidelines and develop and test the app. NeoMate was released in 2015 to widespread acclaim and was awarded a prestigious NHS Innovation Acorn Challenge Prize.

In 2022 NeoMate was used around 100,000 times across the UK and further afield, with over half a million uses of the app since its release. That’s a huge number of babies receiving high quality care thanks to the skill and knowledge of our community and a little bit of help from NeoMate.

The implementation of Brexit brought changes to the regulation of medical apps and medical devices in the UK which, together with the rapid pace of change in mobile app development, led to major challenges in updating NeoMate in line with national guidelines and the latest research.

To address these challenges, in 2023 the original core team founded a private limited company to take on the NeoMate mission, providing support and long-term stability for NeoMate and ensuring that it remains at the cutting edge of neonatal practice.

The promise of the NeoMate team is that the NeoMate app will always be a free gift to the neonatal community – and, most importantly, our patients. We will be seeking sponsorship and developing other paid-for apps to raise funds for the ongoing development of NeoMate.

Latest Update v3.3

An updated version of NeoMate was released in September 2023, to provide updated drug doses, updated guidelines, improved growth charts, and address some minor technical bugs. Detailed changes include:

• Updated dose of adrenaline to latest Resuscitation Council guidelines
• Atropine dose adjusted to BNFc
• Max weight reduced from 7kg to 6kg
• BAPM guideline update to include infographic
• CFM guide working again
• Clinic growth charts: infants born at 37-42 weeks are now plotted at their precise age, and not at 40 weeks (as was previously recommended on paper charts)
• External links now working
• Various other minor bug fixes

We are in the late stages of developing NeoMate 2.0, a ground-up rewrite that promises innovative new features whilst retaining everything that’s great about NeoMate. The modern software framework supports the latest smartphone features and will enable rapid update releases.

We’re so grateful for all the support for NeoMate over the past eight years, and very excited to be bringing you a great new app in 2023/2024 that will continue to support the amazing work that you do.